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The United Nations special rapporteur on torture reiterated Friday a warning that Julian Assange’s life is at risk and said the WikiLeaks founder must not be extradited to the United States as a consequence of “exposing serious governmental misconduct.” “While the U.S. government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity,” said special rapporteur Nils Melzer in a new statement.
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Julian Assange’s Life Is at Risk, Says United Nations Expert
by Andrea Germanos
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture reiterated Friday a warning that Julian Assange’s life is at risk and said the WikiLeaks founder must not be extradited to the United States as a consequence of “exposing serious governmental misconduct.” “While the U.S. government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity,” said special rapporteur Nils Melzer in a new statement.
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture reiterated Friday a warning that Julian Assange’s life is at risk and said the WikiLeaks founder must not be extradited to the United States as a consequence of “exposing serious governmental misconduct.”
“While the U.S. government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity,” said special rapporteur Nils Melzer in a new statement.
Free press advocates see Assange as victim of an unprecedented assault on journalism because the WikiLeaks publisher faces 18 charges in the U.S. under the Espionage Act—making Assange the first publisher to face charges under that law. Currently in London’s Belmarsh prison for skipping bail seven years ago when he first took refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange last month lost a bid to postpone his U.S. extradition hearing in February.
Melzer’s new comments come five months after he visited Assange in prison and said Assange exhibited “all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture.” But warnings about Assange’s treatment, the U.N. expert said, went unheeded.
The U.K. government has shown “outright contempt for Mr. Assange’s rights and integrity,” said Melzer, and failed to take “any measures of investigation, prevention, and redress required under international law.”
Assange has also not been given his right to prepare his defense, Melzer said, because his “access to legal counsel and documents has been severely obstructed.”
“In a cursory response sent nearly five months after my visit, the U.K. government flatly rejected my findings, without indicating any willingness to consider my recommendations, let alone to implement them, or even provide the additional information requested,” said Melzer.
“He continues to be detained under oppressive conditions of isolation and surveillance, not justified by his detention status,” Melzer said of Assange.
The driving force behind the harsh treatment and potential life behind bars appears evident to Melzer.
“In my view, this case has never been about Mr. Assange’s guilt or innocence, but about making him pay the price for exposing serious governmental misconduct, including alleged war crimes and corruption,” Melzer said. “Unless the U.K. urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr. Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.”
Assange’s case, argue WikiLeaks and whistleblowing researchers Felicity Ruby and Naomi Colvin, deserves the world’s attention.
“The indictments for which Assange is now imprisoned have nothing to do with Sweden, Russia, Trump, or his cat,” Ruby and Colvin wrote at New Internationalist. “They are a straightforward attempt to prosecute a publisher for committing acts of journalism: specifically the releases of 2010-11 on Guantanamo Bay, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Cablegate. These are the most significant series of public-interest disclosures of our times.”
“For this journalism, he is held, alone for more than 20 hours a day in a cell on the health ward of Belmarsh, only just able to receive documents from his lawyers. Years of unsympathetic and hostile treatment from his peers have left him almost as alone in the public realm as he is now in Belmarsh,” wrote Ruby and Colvin. “And yet it is on this man, resilient but much weakened after a decade of unrelenting pressure that the future of the freedom to report, and to read, rests.”
Originally published by CommonDreams.org
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Balfour Declaration: A Wrong Waiting To Be Righted
by Jafar M Ramini
November 2nd 2019 is the 102nd anniversary of one of the darkest days in the
bloody history of the British Empire. For exactly 102 years ago today the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour wrote a personal letter to Lord Walter Rothschild in which he gifted him Palestine as a ‘home’ for the Jews.
Today, November 2nd 2019 is the 102nd anniversary of one of the darkest days in the bloody history of the British Empire. For exactly 102 years ago today the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour wrote a personal letter to Lord Walter Rothschild in which he gifted him Palestine as a ‘home’ for the Jews.
That fact that Palestine, at the time, had been an Arab country for 1500 years and was populated by Arab Muslims and Christians with a small minority of Jews (5%) mattered not a jot to his Lordship. Despite the caveat in his letter which reads, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, Lord Balfour and his Zionist, Christian colleagues had no intention of honouring this caveat. Here he is talking privately to Lord Curzon who succeeded him:
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
He also said: “So far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers [at the first world war peace talks] have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.” Jewish Israeli historian and Oxford Professor, Avi Shlaim described the Balfour Declaration as “ both immoral and illegal”.
The British Raj in the person of the then Secretary of State for Colonies, Winston Churchill, continued to show utter disregard for the wishes and aspirations of the Palestinians. In 1937, Churchill’s remarks after the Peel Report were as racist and dismissive of the Palestinian Nation as could be.
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
The intentions of the the Jewish Zionists was made clear by the father of right-wing Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky who in his essay of 1923, ‘The Iron Wall – Us and The Arabs’ made it clear that force was the only way to create the Zionist dream in Palestine. He wrote:
“ Zionist colonisation must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”
This Iron Wall policy, aided and abetted by first, the then colonial power, Great Britain, and adopted and continued by the now prevailing power, the United States of America, has been the modus operandi of concurrent Israeli governments. The so-called war of independence in 1948, the tripartite (Israel, France and Britain) attack on Egypt in1956, the six-day war of 1967 all were designed to acquire land by force and compel the Arabs to accept a ‘fait acompli’ from a position of weakness.
As a result we have the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the 1993 Oslo Accord between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel to be closely followed by the 1994 Wadi Araba peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. All reached and signed on from the point of strength on the Israeli side and the point of weakness on the Arab side.
Israel is growing in strength and belligerence with the tacit approval, nay, encouragement, of the United States of America and its western allies. The settlements are expanding and the land grab is continuing apace. Meanwhile, the Arabs are more fragmented than ever and engaged in destructive, internal wars that can only serve the purpose of the colonial power in Palestine. Meanwhile, Palestine is weakened by internal divisions and squabbles that also serve the purpose of the occupiers of our land.
A bleak picture by all accounts. Despite all of this, we the Palestinian people, having suffered immensely for the last century or so are still standing fast, resisting our occupiers, resisting our rulers, resisting the betrayal of our so-called Arab and Muslim brethren and all the pressures that have been brought upon us by all, especially the United States of America.
Yet, in the last decade or so, there has been a noticeable shift in western public opinion, especially amongst the young. In particular amongst the Jewish younger generation in the US who are saying “not in my name’ and asking the question, “If not now, then when?”
“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”
Thomas Jefferson
Jafar M Ramini is a Palestinian writer and political analyst, based in London, presently in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Jenin in 1943 and was five years old when he and his family had to flee the terror of the Urgun and Stern gangs. Justice for the people of Palestine is a life-long commitment.
The Missing Pieces of Al-Baghdadi’s Execution Puzzle
by Nauman Sadiq
Casting aspersions over the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Russia’s seasoned Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed while speaking to Rossiya 24 broadcaster that the Islamic State and its slain “caliph” were the spawns of the United States. Being a skilled diplomat having intimate knowledge of happenings on the ground in Syria, his statement merits serious consideration.
China Breaks the Western Debt Stranglehold on the World
by Peter Koenig
China is invited to build infrastructure,
fast trains, roads, ports and industrial parks – and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is more than welcomed in Africa, as it projects common and equal development for all to benefit. BRI is the epitome for building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind. China also offers a gradual release from the US / western dominated dollar-debt claws. Freeing a country from the dollar-based economy, is freeing it from the vulnerability of US /western imposed sanctions. This is an enormous relief that literally every country of the Global South – and possibly even Europe – is hoping for.
The west has colonized, exploited, ravaged and assassinated the people of the Global South for hundreds of years.
Up to the mid-20th Century Europe has occupied Africa, and large parts of Asia.
In Latin America, though much of the sub-Continent was “freed” from Spain and Portugal in the 19th Century – a new kind of colonization followed by the new Empire of the United States – under the so-called Monroe Doctrine, named after President James Monroe (1817 -1825), forbidding Europeans to interfere in any “American territory”. Latin America was then and is again today considered Washington’s Backyard.
In the last ten years or so, Washington has launched the Monreo Doctrine 2.0. This time expanding the interference policy beyond Europe – to the world. Democratic sovereign governments in Latin America that could choose freely their political and economic alliances in the world are not tolerated. China, entering into partnership agreements with Latin American countries, sought after vividly by the latter – is condemned by the US and the west, especially vassalic Europe.
Therefore, democratically elected center-left governments had to be “regime-changed’ – Honduras, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay. So far, they stumbled over Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua – and maybe Mexico.
Venezuela and Cuba are being economically strangled to exhaustion. But they are standing tall as pillars in defending the Latin American Continent – with economic assistance and military advice from China and Russia.
Latin America is waking up – and so is Africa.
In Latin America, street protests against the US / IMF imposed debt trap and de consequential austerity programs, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, are raging in Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina and even in Brazil. In Argentina, in a democratic election this past weekend, 27 October, the people deposed neoliberal President Macri.He wasput in the Presidencyvia“tricked” elections by Washington in 2015. Macri ruined the prosperous country in his 4 year-reign. He privatized public services and infrastructure, education, health, transportation – and more, leading to hefty tariff increases, worker layoffs, unemployment and poverty. Poverty, at about 15% in 2015, when Macri took office, soared to over 40% in October 2019.
In 2018 Macri contracted the largest ever IMF loan of US$ 57.2 billion – a debt trap, if there was ever one. The new, just elected Fernandez-Fernandez center-left Government will have to devise programs to counter the impact of this massive debt.
All over in Latin America, people have had enough of the US / western imposed austerity and simultaneous exploitation of their natural resources. They want change – big style. They seek to detach from the economic and financial stranglehold of the west. They are looking for China and Russia as new partners in trade and in financial contracts.
The same in Africa – neocolonialism by the west, mostly France and the UK, through financial oppression, unfair trading deals and wester imposed – and militarily protected – despotic and corrupt leaders, has kept Africa poor and desolate after more than 50 years of so-called Independence. Africa is arguably still the Continent with the most natural resources the west covets and needs to preserve its luxury life style and continuous armament.
People, who do not conform, especially younger politicians and economists, who protest and speak out, because they see clearly through the western imposed economic crimes committed on a daily basis, are simply assassinated or otherwise silenced.
Africans are quietly seeking to move out of the claws of the west, seeking new relations with China and Russia. The recent Russian-African summit in Sochi was a vivid example.
China is invited to build infrastructure, fast trains, roads, ports and industrial parks – and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is more than welcomed in Africa, as it projects common and equal development for all to benefit. BRI is the epitome for building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind. China also offers a gradual release from the US / western dominated dollar-debt claws. Freeing a country from the dollar-based economy, is freeing it from the vulnerability of US /western imposed sanctions. This is an enormous relief that literally every country of the Global South – and possibly even Europe – is hoping for.
However, as could be expected, the west, led by the US of A, is pouncing China for engaging in “debt trap diplomacy” (https://www.rt.com/op-ed/472185-china-debt-trap-diplomacy-debunked/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Email ). Exactly the contrary of what is actually happening.
The truth is, though, countries throughout the world, be it in Africa, Asia, South Pacific and Latin America, are choosing to partner with China by their free will. According to a statement by a high-level African politician “China does not force or coerce us into a deal, we are free to choose and negotiate a win-win situation.” – That says it all.
The difference between the west and east is stark. While anybody and any country that does not agree with the US dictate and doctrine, risks being regime-changed or bombed, China does not impose her new Silk Road – the BRI – to any country. China invites, respecting national sovereignty. Who wants to join is welcome to do so. That applies as much to the Global South, as it does to Europe.
China’s President Xi Jinping launched the BRI in 2013. In 2014 Mr. Xi visited Madame Merkel in Germany, offering her to be at that time the western-most link to the BRI. Ms. Merkel under the spell of Washington, declined. President Xi returned and China continued working quietly on this fabulous worldwide economic development project – BRI – THE economic venture of the 21st Century, so massive that it was incorporated in 2017 into the Chinese Constitution.
It took the west however 6 years to acknowledge this new version of the more than 2000-year-old Silk Road. Only in 2019, the western mainstream media started reporting on the BRI – and always negatively, of course. The preaching was and still is – beware of the Chinese Dragon, they will dominate you and everything you own with their socialism.
This train of thought is typically western. Aggression seems to be in the genes of western societies, of western culture, as the hundreds of years of violent and despotic colonization and exploitation – and ongoing – are proving. Does it have to do with western monotheistic doctrines? – This is pure speculation, of course.
Again, the truth is multi-fold. – First, China does not have a history of invasion. China seeks a peaceful and egalitarian development of trade, science and foremost human wellbeing – a Tao tradition of non-aggression. Second, despite the “warnings” from the throne of the falling empire, about a hundred countries have already subscribed to participate in BRI – and that voluntarily. And third, China and Russia and along with them the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are in a solid economic and defense alliance which encompasses close to half of the world population and represents about one third of the globes total economic output.
Hence, SCO members are – or may be, if they so choose – largely detached from the dollar hegemony. The western privately run and Wall Street controlled monetary transfer system, SWIFT, is no longer needed by SCO countries. They deal in local currencies and / or through the Chinese Interbank Payment System (CIPS).
It is no secret, that the empire, headquartered in Washington, is gradually decaying, economically as well as militarily. It’s just a matter of time. How much time, is difficult to guess. But Washington’s everyday behavior of dishing out sanctions left and right, disrupting international monetary transactions, confiscating and stealing other countries assets around the world, putsever more nails in the Empire’s coffin. By doing this, America is herself committing economic and monetary suicide. Who wants to belong to a monetary system that can act willy-nilly to a county’s detriment? There is no need for outside help for this US-sponsored pyramid fiat monetary system to fall. It’s a house of cards that is already crumbling by its own weight.
The US dollar was some 20-25 years ago still to the tune of 90% the domineering reserve currency in the world. Today that proportion has declined to less than 60% – and falling. It is being replaced primarily by the Chinese yuan as the new reserve currency.
This is what the US-initiated trade war is all about – discrediting the yuan, a solid currency, based on China’s economy – and on gold. “Sanctioning” the Chinese economy with US tariffs, is supposed to hurt the yuan, to reduce its competition with the dollar as a world reserve currency. To no avail. The yuan is a worldwide recognized solid currency, the currency of the world’s second largest economy. By some standards, like accounted by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), the most important socioeconomic indicator for mankind, China is since 2017 the world’s number one economy.
This, and other constant attacks by Washington, is a typical desperate gesture of a dying beast – thrashing wildly left and right and above and below around itself to bring down into its grave as many perceived adversaries as possible. There is of course a clear danger that this fight for the empire’s survival might end nuclear – god forbid!
China’s and Russia’s policy, philosophy and diplomacy of non-aggression may save the world from extinction – including the people of the United States of America.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organizationaround the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog,the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
First published by the New Eastern Outlook – NEO
Congress Party sans Gandhis
by Dr Rahul Kumar
In my opinion, Congress not required to change the name of the party; congress needs not bid farewell to the Gandhis. The need is to inform the people of India about the anti-poor, anti- farmers, anti-Dalits, anti-Muslims, anti-Christians, anti-OBCs policies of the Modi government.
After Haryana and Maharashtra results, the dent has been made by Congress. From two states results in favor of Congress partially, God has made up mind to help the Congress in one way or the other Prof Vivek Kumar, teaching sociology at the Center for the study of social systems, school of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University once said, ‘People cannot be changed, they change by themselves’
BJP’s Nationalism and Electoral Chessboard
by Ram Puniyani
Can the opposition parties committed to issues of people pick up the gauntlet and come forward as a united force to put the national agenda back on the rails of Indian Constitution? Can social movements pick up from here and articulate people’s issues with greater vigor and zest? The limits of Communal agenda and nationalist agenda lies exposed, now the ball is in the court of those who believe in pluralism, diversity and humanism to bring
back the people’s issues and counter the Hate and divisiveness which has filled the social space?
Tamilnadu will always reject Hindutva project to eliminate Dravidian identity work of EVR Periyar
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Iconic statue of EVR Periyar at the Periyar Thidal. His powerful presence in the Dravidian land ensured that the hate-mongering caste supremacists remain out of the power game in Tamilnadu but now the Tamil land is being targeted by the Hindutva forces and their agenda is to finish the Dravidian movement in the state
Goodbye, Tipu Sultan
by Subhash Gatade
It is also well known that the colonisers distorted the Indian subcontinent’s history to suit their imperial interests. They called the uprisings against them mutinies, painted heroes as villains and freedom
fighters as usurpers and terrorists. The move to obliterate Tipu’s name from Kannada history proves that the Hindu Right has finally undertaken the task left unfinished by the colonisers.
Open Letter to Yale University Authorities – Don’t Steal/Hijack/Subvert the Collective Work of ABVA, New Delhi, India.Scrap Brudner Prize 2019
by Dr P S Sahni
It has been brought to our notice that the official website of LGBT Studies, Yale University states that the Brudner prize 2019-20 is being awarded posthumously to Siddhartha Gautam(SG) for his invaluable contribution to the LGBT struggle in India. SG joined AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) briefly for about two years and worked with six other co-authors of Less than Gay: A citizens’ report on the status of homosexuality in India (brought out by ABVA in
1991).
Support the Struggle of the People of Gobindpur, Nuagaon and Dhinkia
Press Release
We condemn the clandestine and illegal manner in which the Odisha government is facilitating the transfer of land acquired from the local betel vine growers and fisherfolk in Jagatsinghpur district to Jindal Steel Works. The alienation of agriculturally fertile land from the peasantry for the purpose of industry snatches away from them their perennial source of income and livelihood. The gains made by the 12 –years-long people’s struggle against POSCO seem to be spurned by the government as it paves the way for another steel conglomerate.
Consecration
by Arathy Asok
My spine is bent, Sir
You can see the bones jutting out;
My hands
I have stretched,
To touch your feet
My index finger on your right toe:
Can’t you see, Yes?
